Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a micropump, and more particularly, to a micropump configured to include a planar electrode or a cylinder electrode installed so that a direct-current or alternating-current electric field is applied to a rectangular channel or a cylinder channel and to be capable of transporting an insulation fluid with low conductivity in the range of 10−10 to 10−12 S/m.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, interest and development of microfluidic systems have increased internationally. Such microfluidic systems are systems using micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies and are very important systems applied to fields such as clinical diagnoses, bio-medicine studies such as DNA and peptide, chemical analyses for new medicine development, ink jet printing, small cooling systems, small fuel cell fields.
Micropump and microvalves are core components configured to enable a fluid to flow in such a microfluidic system and have fluid control functions of adjusting an amount of fluid and a rate of the fluid and blocking the flow.
Here, micropumps are devices, such as small mechanical devices, minute fluid dynamics devices, microrobots, and electromechanical devices, configured to transport a fluid in a variety of fields and are evaluated as very important technologies in the near future.
In the related art, since pump devices configured to realize mechanical pressure transduction mainly used to transmit a fluid have very large sizes, there are technical limitations in manufacturing the pump devices with very small sizes. Therefore, there is a problem that it is difficult to apply the pump devices to micropumps required to have very small sizes.
In order to overcome the foregoing problems, in the related art, technologies for transporting a fluid by electrohydraulic flow occurring at the time of application of an electric field to the fluid to transport the fluid with a simple structure without using many components have been used to manufacture micropumps.
As representative examples, there are an ion-drag pump and an electro-sensitive fluid micropump usable for an insulation fluid.
However, the ion-drag pump and the electro-sensitive fluid micropump of the related art have the following technical problems.
First, the technologies of the related art have the problems that a target fluid usable in a pump is specified and it is difficult to apply the technologies to a general-purpose insulation fluid with electric conductivity in the range of 10−10 to 10−12 S/m.
Second, in the technologies of the related art, a micropump is operated only by a direct-current (DC) electric field and a flow rate of an insulation fluid is adjusted only by a voltage.